The art of excess consumerism

Artists - some can cleverly twist your mind with their masterpieces, have you exploring new realities and considering new possibilities, examining the profoundness of life, questioning the reality of being, and so on. Some, on the other hand, are just a lot of pretentious old bollocks.

Chris Jordan is certainly one of the former, marrying up the excesses of consumerism with art in a very practical and effective manner. Jordan visualises American culture through the statistics of consumption - fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on.

The piece below depicts 320,000 light bulbs, equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the US every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage (inefficient wiring, computers in sleep mode, etc):

If you don't like that, there's probably a glass tiger crapping in a bucket at the Tate Modern.